About Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti is best known for his elongated, withered representations of the human form, including his 1960 sculpture Walking Man I, which in 2010 broke the record for a work of art at auction at $104.3 million. After experimenting with Cubism and Surrealism in forms influenced by primitive art, psychoanalytic theory, and toys, Giacometti broke from Surrealism and began his radical revision of the representational tradition in sculpture. Giacometti's severe figures explored the psyche and the charged space occupied by a single person. Linked to Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism, they are seen as metaphors for the postwar experience of doubt and alienation.